Category: Reflection

Today, our host at http://www.ethicalela.com for Day 2 of February’s Open Write is Linda Mitchell of Virginia. She inspires us today to make a mash-up poem. You can read her prompt here, along with the poems of others. Here is the basic process she describes:

Read two works, perhaps poems you have loved for a long time. Find lines that speak to each other. Take a line from one poem and mash it up against one from the other. See how many lines complement each other as a new work. Write these lines, or copy and paste these lines, into a new work.

My all-time favorite poet is Mary Oliver, and my favorite poem is The Storm, from her collection Dog Songs. My father gave me a book of poetry entitled Poetry’s Plea for Animals by Frances E. Clarke, and in it there is a poem by T. A. Daly entitled Da Pup Een Da Snow, which may have actually inspired Mary Oliver’s poem The Storm. Oliver’s lines are in bold, and Daly’s are not.

Here is my Mash-Up:

                                                                          Da Pup Een Da Snow Storm

Eef you jus' coulda seen -

                                running here running there, excited

gona wild weeth delight

                                now through the white orchard my little dog

ees first play een da snow

                               with wild feet

all around' da whole place

                                hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins

an' fall down on hees face

teel hees cover' weeth white

                                until the white show is written upon
                        
                                in large, exuberant letters

w'en he see da flakes sail

how he chasa hees tail

                               the pleasures of the body in this world

deed you evra see joy

gona wild weeth delight
 
                               with wild feet

mak's heem crazy excite'

you would know w'at I mean

Eef you jus' coulda seen -